More than ever, we’re really damn proud to know, love, and share the songs and stories of Deryck Whibley.
Sum 41 has impacted the lives of so many people, especially those who were teens and young adults in the early-to-mid 2000s. The band and their music also helped define that era and the subsequent rock scene for years to come. They’ve masterfully tackled the pop punk genre, the metal genre, and the hardcore all the while being a leading voice. Remember the Y2K era when they were basically inescapable? Us, too. Every radio station was blasting their singles and every other MTV video showcased their videos. Later on in the 2010s, the group was added to virtually every single YouTube playlist. Even now, in 2024, their songs are still going strong, and hits both new and old are revered on TikTok.) Sum 41 is such a timeless rock band that it can take on any musical medium that occurs in pop culture and take a good portion of it by storm.
Deryck Whibley, frontman of Sum 41 and overarching vocalist, songwriter, guitarist, and founder, has lived an insanely fascinating life. His first book, the memoir Walking Disaster, was released two weeks ago. It’s quite the read; the books dives into his past and his rise to fame, and he gently, yet honestly takes us through every foundational step in his life and career. The book showcases profound moments in Whibley’s life, such as growing up without a dad, but his mom always being there for him, and the abuse he encountered from his step-dads. He discusses the verbal assault, grooming, and manipulation of the band’s former manager (who was once a hero to him and the band). He dives into suffering from PTSD after a near death experience in the Congo that occurred in the midst of a war strike. He also dissects his divorce, his abuse of alcohol, and his passion for being a creative. It’s a gripping book filled with passion, and every page is more interesting, shocking, and inspiring than the last.
The Aquarian had the amazing opportunity to sit down with Deryck Whibley – one of our longtime friends in addition to leading Sum 41 and being a first-time author – and chat about this memoir. We unpacked more about his past, the writing process, and the hardest parts of putting such personal pen to paper.
We’re talking all about your new book, Walking Disaster, so can you tell me how you’re feeling? What are some of the thoughts going on in your head?
New book and first book! It’s all new to me. It’s cool, it’s exciting. I’m a little nervous at the same time, but, I mean, I’m also really not that nervous. I think I was nervous before when I was actually writing it and putting it together – when I started realizing, “Holy shit! I’m actually going to let it all out and be really personal! I’m really going to be honest and let all the things out.” These are things that I thought I would take to my grave.
I didn’t set out to say, “Ok, now I have a book, so I am going to talk about this.” I didn’t know what I was going to write. I was just going to write my story. I don’t even know what my story is! I’ll remember it as I’m writing. As I got to certain parts, certain things that were hard to deal with in life, things that I buried, forgot about, and intentionally didn’t think about, that’s when it all started coming out. I thought, “How the fuck am I going to put this out?” Then, over time, I got used to it. I had to read it over and edit myself. My first draft was a disaster and I had to go over it again. The more times I went over it, I started to get used to my own story and got numb to it. I don’t even care anymore. It is what it is. I’m not that nervous.
That has to be so different than when writing music. In song you can say how you feel more vaguely, whereas writing a book, you’re talking about specific people and instances. That’s got to be more difficult to put out there.
Yeah, and I wrote about all the people. All those situations and all of those people are in my songs, but nobody knows that. When you’re writing the book, you are specific – this person did this to me or this is how this relationship went, and stuff like that! It becomes a whole different thing. I enjoyed it, though. That is what I was excited about for writing a book in the first place. I’m so personal in my music, but you only get a couple minutes to write something. It’s not like a diary; you can’t be so literal and you’re not going to name names. It’s a little different. I thought, “Well, this could be interesting, because now I can actually open up those songs and talk about what they’re really about in detail.”
Those were some of my favorite parts of the whole book. Going into “The Hell Song” about your friend’s HIV diagnosis or how “Blood In My Eyes” was about your divorce. It gave fans a peek behind the curtain.
I didn’t think of anything, but when I was reading it back, I started thinking, “I don’t know how I would leave any of these stories out.” Even the stuff with my old manager which I always thought was stuff I would take to my grave. I don’t know how to tell the time of those records [without him]. He was in the band’s life for the first four albums. I don’t know how I can talk about those albums without talking about Greig Nori, and everything we went through – the good and the bad.
Even as we are discussing it now, it has to be bittersweet to talk about – those painful moment and also those proud memories about Sum 41 while on your last record cycle… to be looking back at your career now and the aspect of being at the end of the Sum 41.
I’m not one who spends a lot of time in memory lane. I remember the past fondly and pretty vividly. I am much more present in the present and in the now… with a little bit of an eye on the future. I don’t really look back too much unless I’m forced to. For the purpose of this book, I look back and put it all out there. Either way, I like the idea of putting a book out in this time as Sum 41 is wrapping up. It is the final record [Heaven :X: Hell]. It wraps the entire project up for me. It would feel weird to do this last record, last tour, and – then in 10 years – write a book. I’d rather just wrap this whole chapter of my life up. “Here’s the whole thing. Now I’m starting something new.” Everything’s out there, I can leave it all behind and start brand new next year.
The book coincides with the end of the band a perfect way. The book, speaking of, goes in chronological order from when you were a kid to the rise of Sum 41 to now. When you were writing it, did you start at the beginning, or hop around?
No, I just started at the beginning. I didn’t really know how to write a book. I had never written a book and I didn’t even know if I could write a book. I said, “Ok, fuck it – how do I do this?” I just started writing. Before I even got to the point of writing, actually, I remember thinking I don’t have a story for a book. “My life is boring. I’m just a normal guy. Cool, I started a band and we had some success.” I don’t know how to tell this story. I have read a lot of those rockstar books – Tommy Lee and The Dirt and Nikki Six, or Slash’s, or Ozzy’s books, or any of them. Those are books! Wild stories! I’ve got nothing on those guys. “I don’t know if I have a story for a book,” I thought, and that is actually what was freeing me up. “No matter what, just don’t try to make yourself sound cool. Just tell the story. If it’s boring, then it’s fucking boring; who gives a shit?” I know I’ve enjoyed my life. I love my life. If people think it’s boring, it’s fine. What do I care? Once I got to that point, I just started writing and it all just came out.
I’ve got to be honest, from a fan of Sum 41 and a music journalist, this was the furthest thing from being boring. Every chapter was more gripping than the next. From the bus vandalism and how that turned your life around, it was all so surprising.
When I write about some of these stories… I don’t know, to me, that was just a Wednesday. It just felt not that exciting to me. I’ve enjoyed my life and I don’t look back at anything. I don’t think it’s boring for me, but as a book, I thought, “Is this going to be any good at all?” Like I said, I don’t really care, but how do you judge somebody’s life? “I don’t like this book because I don’t like your life.” Well, you don’t have to!
Do you still feel that way, or do you feel like, “Wow, I have some good stories to share” now that you’re sharing them?
I’m at that point where I just don’t think about it. I love my journey. I’ve loved every second of it. Obviously there were a lot of downs in it and I don’t love it in the moment when things are really difficult, but I love the fact that I’ve gone through things. I love how I always feel better no matter what I go through. I always feel stronger, better, smarter, and, all around, I’m glad it happened. I just hated it when I was in it.
I feel like the book does a good job of showing the waves. Everytime there’s a dark chapter, the next chapter is almost celebratory. This really is the high and low of Sum 41, as well as your life.
My whole life is wrapped up in Sum 41. I’ve never really had a break from Sum 41. If there’s something going on in the morning in my life, it comes out in the evening in Sum 41. They’re all intertwined. If I have a bad/good day, I’m usually working on Sum 41 that same day. It informs what I’m doing. It informs my work. That’s how I knew I couldn’t leave out the Greig Nori stuff. A lot of the stuff I was going through with him, where it was the mental [aspect of] putting me down in the studio, I still have to sing the fucking song even though I’m going through this hell with him. I’m in the studio that day and I’m going through personal hell, but I have to professionally get my work done. It was just all there at the same time. Sometimes I was writing to shut him up because I was so angry! That’s how I wrote “Still Waiting” – just to shove it in his face!
With the Greig stuff, you talk about how when you first met him, how he was your hero. Then there was that slow disillusionment of realizing he was not the person you thought he was when you were 15 years old.
It took longer than I wish it did. Part of that was because he was my hero for years when I was young. When I got older, it really started to get bad, but slowly. It was not overnight. It just deteriorates but you don’t notice it. You’re wrapped up and all of the sudden your entire world is wrapped up in it. You just feel like, “I don’t see how there is a way out of this. How the fuck do you get out? He’s our manager, our producer, he’s like the fifth member of our band. We can’t function without him,” is what you start to feel like. You finally just reach a breaking point. “I may not be able to function without him, but I can’t function with him either.” Once the band got to the same realization professionally, that we couldn’t function with him, finally it was a collaborative decision to let him go. It wasn’t just up to me anymore.
Even when the band finally had that realization, as a reader, it felt like a relief. There were three record cycles where the band hadn’t come to that realization and it was just you dealing with it.
Yeah, totally! It was after four records when things got really bad and I was on tour with him. I had this mental break. I pulled down this light and sliced my hand open, [then] had to go to the hospital. That was on Half Hour of Power, which was our first EP. It was already bad at that point and it went all the way to Chuck which was our fourth release. It was at the end of the Chuck cycle. It was the last show of the Chuck cycle was the day we fired him– going into the fifth record. It was a long time of… I don’t know, turmoil, mental fuck-ery, everything.
You discuss in the book, during the Chuck album cycle, that you had the PTSD from the Congo and all of that stuff occurring personally at the same time! It seemed like turmoil from all ends.
Yeah, it was that. I was also falling in love with Avril [Lavigne]. We were starting our relationship. That was the light in my life and it was feeling dimmed because, again, Greig was trying to poison that relationship with the rest of the band. The relationship never really had a chance within the band. It was hated before it started. Then, when it started, it got hated even more. It seperated us to a degree within the band. There was this unspoken dislike for this relationship to be happening. It was a wedge in between the band. You’ve got Greig, the wedge, and then you’ve got the PTSD; it was definitely a fucked up time for sure.
It was not as bad as things got by Screaming Bloody Murder when Stevo and I were, and the band, was imploding. Stevo eventually quit at that point because it eventually got so bad between us all. That era was a lot worse than that. Who knows why that was worse? For me, it was alcohol. Everybody had their own thing. There was a lot of anger going on. The band was not doing well at that point. That was one of the biggest factors of that whole thing – we were all coping with the band falling apart internally and professionally not doing as well. I think we were all coping in different ways. I was feeling like an odd man out between Stevo and I. It felt like we were falling apart.
Reading that part of the book got me very sad because Screaming Bloody Murder is one of the most underrated albums of all time.
It’s my favorite Sum 41 album! Or it is at least up there as being my proudest work. I tried to explain in the book what happened with that record. The label wanted nothing to do with putting any money into that album whatsoever – they barely wanted that record to come out. It was also at a different time in the music business. Any rock band at the time was starting to lean pop because it was the only way you could get any traction on radio. [Rock music] started turning kind of indie sounding and yet we made a heavy fucking record! All of those things combined left that record to go unnoticed. When I was writing that record, I always felt like that record was a gift. Even though things were tough in my life, when I first started writing it, my marriage was falling apart, then I went through a divorce, but I was writing songs with such ease back then. It was a really weird thing where I could just sit down and write a song in five minutes – all the words and everything! It was just there, and I really liked the material!
I hadn’t fallen apart yet. I was actually firing on all cylinders. My life was great even though I just went through a divorce. Once I got over that pain, everything was fucking awesome. I was living a life that I never thought I’d live, never really dreamed of, but then I realized that I was living my dream life. I had so much freedom and I had been living in LA for so long that I knew everybody and everywhere. It felt like I had the keys to the city. It was this really easy [and] great time. Then we took that show on the road and things started getting really bad between us and the label. Ttours weren’t selling as well, band tensions grew, and the tour just went on. It was a three year cycle, the longest tour we’d ever done, and we just got more and more beaten down. Then we started coping unintentionally. I injured my back on that tour, so I started drinking to self medicate the pain. We all just spiraled out of control.
You mention the fluidity of how you were able to write songs easily. Even just the transition between “Holy Image of Lies” into “Sick of Everyone” into “Happiness Machine” on that record. It’s so seamless, and it came out of that time.
It came out so simply. There was no thought in that stuff. I just wrote some music then I wrote another thing and that would work together. These songs just came out within under 15 minutes was the average time for creating these songs. It was all the words, all the melody, everything was just done.
And at that point you’d been pretty much a pop punk band for four records. Then you drop Screaming Bloody Murder, which is the heaviest Sum 41 album to date, but also the darkest.
By that point the label was a new label. They weren’t people who signed us, they didn’t know anything about us, they didn’t care much about us. They were an R&B label at that point. When we were at Island [Def Jam Music Group], we were the first rock band they signed to go and have success. They really went after rock bands. They signed Fall Out Boy, they signed The Killers, they had a bunch of other stuff, too. They were really doing well. Then the president left, and then everybody left. The person who came in was L.A. Reid, who was a hip-hop and R&B guy. He brought his team in. It became an R&B label and it was like, “Ok, who is this band? What do we do with them”? Then we handed in our heavy record and they were just like, “Uh… I guess so! Can you do a pop song?” We’re like, “No! How are we going to put a pop song on this record? What are you talking about?” They said, “Well if you don’t have anything we can take to pop radio, we’re not going to do anything.” They didn’t give us a video. They didn’t do anything for it.
I took that stuff really hard back then, especially since I felt like that was the best work I’d ever done at that point. I just thought, “Man, I can’t wait for this to get to the world and people hear this and think the same thing.” It never got out there. It just never got out there. It didn’t get to the world. There was no marketing behind it. It was just put out quietly in the dark. You start seeing the tours not doing well next and you start thinking, “Where does this all go?”
In the book, one of my favorite parts is when you discuss the 13 Voices album and the bounce back from all of that. The introduction to Frank Zummo on drums, too! There was so much in there form that era that I’m happy you dove into.
Yeah, I tried to explain everything as much as I could. Even though it’s a book, I still wish I could have gotten more out, but they have to be a certain amount of pages/words. I would have written a 500 page book if I could. You have to hit everything as quickly as you can with as much information. I tried to hit everything I could. I hit all the main things. There are lots of stories that get left out, but the main gist of everything is there.
In the book you write about B.D and Kevin, and all the issues you’ve had with father figures. As a parent, how does it feel to write those sections looking back now?
I don’t know if it hit me as I was writing them. Those things have always been on my mind my entire life. I’ve always thought about them – those situations and never really having a solid father figure. Even before I had kids I always wondered, “Is that going to be weird for me?” I have two kids now and I couldn’t imagine some of it. My son is four-and-a-half years old and I remember being that age and the aggressiveness of B.D. – I couldn’t imagine being an adult and having that kind of anger towards a child that small. It’s just so weird to me to think about. I had never really seen it in perspective until I had a kid. Once you hit those ages you start to see, “Oh, that’s how old I was when that happened! Interesting.”
That’s what made me realize things about Greig Nori that I hadn’t thought about. Once I hit 35… that was how old he was when I met him at 16 years old. Why the fuck was he hanging out with me? Why did he give me his number? I would never. He was a famous rockstar in Canada, what did he want to do with me? It puts things in perspective. The last thing I would want to do right now is hang out with a 16-year-old kid who was a superfan of me, give me drugs and alcohol, and have him come over to my house. That’s fucking weird!
On the good side, my mom had me so young. I never knew she was young. She was just my mom. She was always old to me growing up. Once I started hitting 21-22, I realized, “Man, she had a six-year-old kid then.” I remember being 23 and going, “I couldn’t imagine having the kid I was at this age.” Once we started having success, my mom was only in her thirties. My mom and Greig are the same age! It just puts everything in perspective; how much she had to deal with at such a young age. how much she actually did, and how tough she was with all the shit she went through at such a young age really blew me away.
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